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Given how often they’re on the floor, occasionally inside a public restroom, it should come as no surprise that one-third of women’s purses crawl with E. coli.

And given how many grubby hands and baby bottoms touch grocery- store shopping carts, we shouldn’t flinch at the fact that, on average, they carry 115 times more bacteria than a toilet seat.

It’s a dirty world we’re living in, and often our most germy encounters are not where we expect them.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that each year

48 million people get sick in the United States, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.

To improve your odds, you should reduce exposure to germs, a feat best accomplished with regular hand-washing, using hand sanitizer and keeping hands away from your face, said Charles Gerba, a germ expert at the University of Arizona.

It also means cleaning those grimy items you rarely think to clean, such as remote controls and cellphones.

Need motivation? Here are average bacteria counts, per square inch, for a dozen common germ-infested items we encounter in our daily lives, according to Gerba, who has tested hundreds of surfaces.